الفصل الفصل 89 · A RECRUDESCENCE OF DIVINE RIGHT

End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.

The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as

it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the

barbarians; only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet

name of the counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to

panting, and halted short. The Empire was bewept,—let us acknowledge

the fact,—and bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword

converted into a sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had

diffused over the earth all the light which tyranny can give—a sombre

light. We will say more; an obscure light. Compared to the true

daylight, it is night. This disappearance of night produces the effect

of an eclipse.

Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July

effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the

antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was

white. The exile reigned. Hartwell’s pine table took its place in front

of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy

were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding day,

Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne

fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the

health of society in the nineteenth century was established over

France, and over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade.

Trestaillon was celebrated. The device _non pluribus impar_ reappeared

on the stone rays representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on

the Quai d’Orsay. Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now

a red house. The Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne

victories, thrown out of its element among these novelties, a little

ashamed, it may be, of Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its

predicament with the statue of the Duc d’Angoulême. The cemetery of the

Madeleine, a terrible pauper’s grave in 1793, was covered with jasper

and marble, since the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in

that dust.

In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,

recalling the fact that the Duc d’Enghien had perished in the very

month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the

coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on

the fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there

was a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King

of Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their

thrones, and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime

became the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the

earth changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer’s

day, a shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, “Go this way, and not

that!”

This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and

poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded

1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became

constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with

Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was

the serpent’s change of skin.

Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this

reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of

ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future

into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so

fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is

he doing? “Napoleon is dead,” said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo

and Waterloo. “He dead!” cried the soldier; “you don’t know him.”

Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of

Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous

remained long empty through Napoleon’s disappearance.

The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by it

to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; _Belle-Alliance_,

Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.

In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the

features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the

Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,

Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.

Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with the

future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the

vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon

erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by

Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms

became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him “my

sleeplessness.” This terror was the result of the quantity of

revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and

excuses Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to

tremble. The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of

Saint Helena on the horizon.

While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the

sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly

rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.

The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called

this the Restoration.

This is what Waterloo was.

But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,

that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a

moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from

one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to

belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.